Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
60 free Billy Wilder trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Billy Wilder arrived in Hollywood in 1934 speaking little English and left it with six Oscars, seven films in the National Film Registry and, by Roger Ebert's count, three of the greatest closing lines in cinema. This quiz starts with the life: the cake shop in Galicia, the taxi-dancing in Berlin, the flight from the Nazis, the family lost in the Holocaust, the partnership with Charles Brackett and later I. A. L. Diamond, and the epitaph that reads "I'm a writer but then nobody's perfect". Then it goes film by film: Ninotchka and "Garbo Laughs!", the Hays Code battles over Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend, Norma Desmond and the waxworks in Sunset Boulevard, Kirk Douglas in Ace in the Hole, William Holden's Oscar for Stalag 17, Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina, the subway grate in The Seven Year Itch, Marlene Dietrich in Witness for the Prosecution, 47 takes of "It's me, Sugar" in Some Like It Hot, the tennis-racket spaghetti of The Apartment, and the late films with Lemmon and Matthau. Easy questions ask which film ends "nobody's perfect"; the expert tier asks about lawsuits, casting near-misses and Cannes. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Wilder and on each film, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. If you like this, try our quizzes on Marilyn Monroe, film noir and classic Hollywood.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Billy Wilder was born in 1906 in Sucha, a small town in Galicia that was then part of which empire?
Austria-Hungary
He liked to say it was "half an hour from Vienna. By telegraph."
Q 02What was Billy Wilder's birth name?
Samuel
His mother nicknamed him Billie after the Buffalo Bill shows she had seen in New York.
Q 03How many Academy Awards did Billy Wilder win?
Six
He received 21 nominations in all: twelve for writing, eight for directing and one for producing.
Q 04Which jazz bandleader took the young Vienna journalist Wilder along to Berlin in 1926?
Paul Whiteman
Whiteman liked the interview so much he brought Wilder with the band, where he made his entertainment contacts.
Q 05Before succeeding as a writer in Berlin, what unusual job did Wilder hold?
Taxi dancer
He was paid to dance with customers while writing crime and sports stories as a stringer.
Q 06Wilder co-wrote the groundbreaking 1930 German film People on Sunday with which future Hollywood directors?
Fred Zinnemann and Robert Siodmak
The film's New Objectivity style is credited with paving the way for Italian neorealism.
Q 07Wilder made his directorial debut, Mauvaise Graine, in 1934 in which city after fleeing Hitler's Germany?
Paris
"It seemed the wise thing for a Jew to do," he said of leaving Berlin.
Q 08Wilder's first big Hollywood success was the 1939 comedy Ninotchka, sold with which tagline?
Garbo Laughs!
Ernst Lubitsch directed; it was Greta Garbo's first comedy and earned Wilder his first Oscar nomination.
Q 09Who was Wilder's screenwriting partner from 1938 to 1950, on films from Ninotchka to Sunset Boulevard?
Charles Brackett
Brackett said his ideas would be torn apart and then turn up days later, slightly changed, as Wilder's.
Q 10Wilder's Hollywood directorial debut in 1942 was which comedy starring Ginger Rogers?
The Major and the Minor
Rogers plays a woman posing as a 12-year-old to travel half fare.
Q 11With which crime novelist did Wilder co-write Double Indemnity?
Raymond Chandler
Chandler expected to finish in a week; it took fourteen, and the two men loathed each other.
Q 12Double Indemnity opens with the wounded Walter Neff confessing into what device?
A dictaphone
He is confessing to claims manager Barton Keyes, played by Edward G. Robinson.
Q 13James M. Cain's Double Indemnity was based on which real 1927 crime?
The Ruth Snyder murder
Snyder and her lover Judd Gray obtained a 45,000-dollar policy on her husband before killing him.
Q 21Which silent-film star played the deluded Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard?
Gloria Swanson
Wilder had first wanted Mae West, who was offended at being asked to play a has-been.
Q 22Which actor was signed to play Joe Gillis but withdrew just before filming, giving William Holden the part?
Montgomery Clift
Clift said the role was too close to his part in The Heiress; Wilder fumed that a real actor could make love to any woman.
Q 23Norma Desmond's bridge partners, whom Joe calls "the waxworks", included which silent comedian playing himself?
Buster Keaton
Anna Q. Nilsson and H. B. Warner made up the table; Hedda Hopper also appears as herself.
Q 14Why had Double Indemnity long been considered unfilmable under the Hays Code?
Adultery was central to the plot
Wilder and Chandler also had to drop the novella's double suicide ending in favour of the lovers shooting each other.
Q 15Wilder cast which actor, then Hollywood's highest-paid star of light comedies, against type as the schemer in Double Indemnity?
Fred MacMurray
He used him again as the philandering boss Sheldrake in The Apartment.
Q 16The Lost Weekend (1945) was the first major American film to seriously examine what?
Alcoholism
The liquor industry allegedly had gangster Frank Costello offer Paramount five million dollars to shelve it.
Q 17Who won Best Actor as the alcoholic writer Don Birnam in The Lost Weekend?
Ray Milland
The film also took Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay and shared the top prize at the first Cannes festival.
Q 18Like The Lost Weekend, which of these won both Best Picture and the top prize at Cannes?
Parasite
The Lost Weekend shared the top prize at the first Cannes festival in 1946; Marty, Parasite and Anora are the other films to have done the double.
Q 19Wilder directed Death Mills, a 1945 documentary about Nazi atrocities, for which audience?
Germans
His own mother, stepfather and grandmother were murdered in the Holocaust.
Q 20Sunset Boulevard opens with the narrator's body floating where?
In a swimming pool
Joe Gillis then narrates his own story in flashback.
Q 24Which director plays himself in Sunset Boulevard, calling Norma "young fella"?
Cecil B. DeMille
His scenes were shot on the set of Samson and Delilah, and the nickname was really his for Swanson.
Q 25Norma Desmond has written a script for her comeback about which biblical figure?
Salome
Joe finds it abysmal but flatters her into hiring him as script doctor.
Q 26Which 1951 Wilder film, about a reporter exploiting a man trapped in a cave, was retitled The Big Carnival by the studio?
Ace in the Hole
Kirk Douglas starred; it was Wilder's first flop and is now considered one of his major works.
Q 27Victor Desny sued for breach of contract, claiming he had pitched the idea for Ace in the Hole to whom?
The director's secretary, by telephone
Desny received a settlement of 14,350 dollars in the California case Wilder v Desny.
Q 28William Holden won his Best Actor Oscar in which Wilder film about American airmen in a German POW camp?
Stalag 17
Holden wanted to make his cynical Sefton more likeable; Wilder refused.
Q 29Which director appears as the POW camp commandant Oberst von Scherbach?
Otto Preminger
Sig Ruman played the guard Schulz.
Q 30In Sabrina, Audrey Hepburn plays the daughter of a wealthy family's what?
Chauffeur
She returns from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris transformed, and Humphrey Bogart's Linus falls for her.